“America’s Biggest Library”

The story is about a closed Wal-mart in McAllen, Texas being remodeled into a public library. Here’s the key paragraph:

Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle transformed an abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, into a 124,500-square-foot public library, the largest single-floor public library in the United States.

Seeing the two key qualifiers in that sentence–“single-floor” and “public”–I was ready to blame the headline writer. But, oops, backing up a sentence, we get:

But at least one of those buildings has been transformed into something arguably much more useful: the nation’s largest library.

No qualifiers. The nation’s largest library. Which caused my BS-meter to go straight into the red zone.

I can pretty much guarantee that there are dozens of academic libraries with more than 124,500 square feet of space, and that the Library of Congress has a whole bunch more space than that.

As for public libraries? Well, as fate other research would have it, I had a handy copy of the IMLS FY2010 Public Library Outlet dataset on hand (the Outlet dataset includes all branches and bookmobiles; I use the other report, that’s just libraries and systems, for most of my research). That dataset includes square footage.

McAllen would appear to be the 72nd largest public library building in the U.S., assuming no other huge libraries have been built since 2010. There’s a little library about 462 miles from McAllen, but still in Texas, that’s a little more than five times as large (Dallas Public at 646,753 square feet) and one 225 miles away that’s 1.9 times as large (San Antonio PL at 238,000 square feet).

Not putting down the McAllen project: That’s a great use of reclaimed space and a good-size public library. But the largest library or biggest library? Not even close, not even in Texas.

For obsessives only

Here’s the list, from largest down (click on the post title to get the sidebar out of the way, although it’s still gonna be wide…)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2012 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Libraries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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